And Would You Like Fries With That?

Before there was “Hi, my name is Lance, and I’ll be your waiter,” there was just plain old “May I take your order?”

Which happens to be the name of a new book by graphic designer-artist Jim Heimann, who lives and dines in Los Angeles. Heimann, 49, a dedicated urban archeologist, memorialized the drive-in in his 1996 tome, “Car Hops and Curb Service.”

“May I Take Your Order?,” a big, glossy paperback (Chronicle Books, $18.95), focuses on American menu design from 1920 to 1960, moving from the time when only an elite few dined out through the post-World War II eating-out boom to pizza parlors, drive-ins and fast food joints.

Longtime Angelenos will remember the Tick Tock, Pig ‘N Whistle, Melody Lane, Ollie Hammond’s, the Bullock’s Wilshire tearoom, Romanoff’s and Wil Wright’s, whose menus are among the 250 color reproductions. Some menus, such as that from Earl Carroll’s, are juxtaposed with terrific old photographs of the interiors.

Tracing the evolution of menus, Heimann’s text embraces both dining--in posh places where “the larger the menu, the reasoning went, the more important a restaurant was”--to eating, as in in-flight meals.

There are 1920s Art Deco menus, V-for-Victory menus from the ‘40s (when many restaurants bowed to rationing with meatless Tuesdays and Fridays), 1950s Atomic Age menus with Sputniks and starbursts, psychedelically inspired menus from the ‘60s, menus in the shapes of pigs, crabs, wine bottles, beer steins, chickens and sombreros.

“I started collecting them for the graphics,” says Heimann. “The graphics are so great, just so seductive.”

One of his favorites is from Sugie’s, a Polynesian-themed restaurant later reincarnated as the Luau. The gimmick: tropical drinks named for movie stars--such as Lana Turner’s Untamed and Claudette Colbert’s Missionary’s Downfall.

To Heimann, menus are more than just nostalgic souvenirs. Their evolving designs, he says, “really kind of parallel the culture at large, whether it’s architecture or manners. The color schemes go from romantic to shocking, stark and disturbing.” One constant: Since the ‘20s, the all-American hamburger has been a staple.

“People are always fascinated with the prices,” Heimann says. Consider a California soda fountain menu from 1950, when a hamburger steak with chili beans and salad cost $1 and a banana split (two scoops) went for 55 cents. Or a 1947 Akron, Ohio, luncheonette menu offering blue point oysters on the half shell for 50 cents.

There are train, plane and ship menus, and there are kiddie menus, including one from the Apple Valley Inn, 1953, featuring a Lone Ranger Dinner for “12 dimes and 11 nickels.”

The Polynesian craze, inspired by Hawaiian statehood, brought fanciful bar menus. Today, Heimann says, “the Hawaiian stuff demands a high price,” as do drive-in menus whose value, he notes, has skyrocketed since he wrote “Car Hops and Curb Service.”

For a change of pace, he’s working on “Sins of the City,” an illustrated book about “the real Los Angeles noir”--dive bars, narcotics, Bunker Hill flophouses, bookmaking, Prohibition, with “some famous murders thrown in.”

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Heimann will be signing “May I Take Your Order?” at 2:30 p.m. May 16 at Dawson’s bookstore, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles.